Added Jul 8, 2005
What makes an artist known for one type of work in one medium suddenly embark on a new mode of expression in an entirely different medium is one of the great mysteries of the creative personality.
" I had not picked up a camera in thirty years before I began this series," the self taught artist Andre van der Kerkhoff, born in Austria and presently a resident of Australia, said of his exhibition " The Seduction of Citizen K," seen recently at Jadite Galleries, 413 West 50th Street, New York.
Since he was previously known for his Australian landscapes, this series of photo-derived female nudes printed on brushed aluminum represents a significant departure for the van der Kerkhoff, who has exhibited widely throughout France, Australia, Canada, and the United States.
" I wanted to explore for the first time the human figure and embrace the new possibilities of digital media," the artist stated of his erotically charged yet formally cool images of comely young models striking seductive poses, set against bare aluminum accented with color areas of an almost Mondrian-like austerity.
Exhibited unframed on the gallery walls, they have a sense of "objectness" that traverses the boundaries between two dimensional representation and sculpture. But it is the tantalizing tension between hot and cool, eroticism and formalism, that lends these works an appeal akin to the deadpan portraiture of Andy Warhol and the "Great American Nudes" series of Tom Wesselmann.
However, van der Kerkhoff approaches his nudes without Pop irony. That their poses are as overt as those in some of the more explicit men's magazines does not suggest a parody or a moral judgment so much as a direct expression of our changing sexual mores. The models are obviously comfortable vamping for the camera and the artist feels no need to depersonalize them, as Wesselmann did when he made his figures increasingly more anonymous.
Rather, he preserves the individuality of his models, even while making the spaces and shapes around them as important a part of each composition as the figures themselves. Indeed, it is the contours of the figures that create these spaces and bring them alive, so that even the empty spaces are permeated by their presence and enlivened as if by a lingering trace of perfume. Even in "Nude XXI", where most of the details vanish into the silvery surface of the aluminum, the figure is brought to life by the geometric forms around it; the placement of one filled-in nipple, like a tiny blue square in a geometric composition by Mondrian, becomes the focal point around which the rest of the figure materializes in the viewer's imagination.
In other works, art historical references are suggested by such details as the naturally elongated torso of the model reclining on her back in "Nude VIII", which recalls the slenderly graceful figures of Modigliani. And even in those works, such as "Nude XII" , where the model's voluptuousness is palpably present and her pose is most explicitly alluring, it is much to Andre van der Kerkhoff's credit that, through the skillful spotting of color areas, he imparts to his compositions a sense of abstraction that makes their purely aesthetic qualities at least as engrossing as the physical attributes of his subjects.
----- Ed McCormack -----